in praise of boredom |

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24/05/2009

IN PRAISE OF BOREDOMPosted by Relembramentos under Artigos | Tags: Essay, In Praiseof Boredom, Joseph Brodsky, Speech |[2] Comments

(Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason Essays, pp.104-113)

Joseph Brodsky

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IN PRAISE OF BOREDOM | https://relembramentos.wordpress.com/2009/05/24/in-praise-...

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But should you fail to keep your kingdomAnd, like your father before you comeWhere thought accuses and feeling mocks,Believe your pain

(W. H. Auden, Alonso to Ferdinand)

A substantial part of what lies ahead of you is going to beclaimed by boredom. The reason Id like to talk to you about ittoday, on this lofty occasion, is that I believe no liberal artscollege prepares you for that eventuality; Darthmouth is noexception. Neither humanities nor science oers courses inboredom. At best, they may acquaint you with the sensation byincurring it. But what is a casual contact to an incurable malaise?The worst monotonous drone coming from a lectern or theeye-splitting textbook in turgid English is nothing in comparisonto the psychological Sahara that starts right in your bedroomand spurns the horizon.

Known under several aliases anguish, ennui, tedium, doldrums,humdrum, the blahs, apathy, listlessness, stolidity, lethargy,languor, accidie, etc boredom is a complex phenomenon andby large a product of repetition. It would seem, then, that thebest remedy against ot would be constant inventiveness andoriginality. That is what you, young and newflanged, would hopefor. Alas, life wont supply you with that option, for lifes mainmedium is precisely repetition.

One may argue, of course, that repeated attempts at originalityand inventiveness are the vehicle of progress and in the samebreath civilization. As benefits of hindsight go, however, thisone is not the most valuable. For should we divide history of ourspecies by scientific discoveries, not to mention ethical


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concepts, the result will not be in our favor. Well get,technically speaking, centuries of boredom. The very notion oforiginality or innovation spells out of the monotony of standardreality, of life, whose main medium nay, idiom is tedium.

In that, it life diers from art, whose worst enemy, as youprobably know, is clich. Small wonder, then, that art, too, failsto instruct you as to how to handle boredom. There are fewnovels about this subject; paintings are still fewer; and as formusic, it is largely nonsemantic. On the whole, art treatsboredom in a self-defensive, satirical fashion. The only way artcan become for you a solace from boredom, from the existentialequivalent of clich, is if you yourselves become artists. Givenyour number, though, this prospect is as unappetizing as it isunlikely.

But even should you march out of this commencement in fullforce to typewriters, easels, and Steinway grands, you wontshield yourselves from boredom entirely. If repetitiveness isboredoms mother, you, young and newfangled, will be quicklysmothered by lack of recognition and low pay, both chronic inthe world of art. In these respects, writing, painting, composingmusic are plain inferior to working for a law firm, a bank, oreven a lab.

Herein, of course, lies arts saving grace. Not being lucrative, itfalls victim to demography rather reluctantly. For if, as wevesaid, repetition is boredoms mother, demography (which is toplay in your lives a far greater role than any discipline youvemastered here) is its other parent. This may sound misanthropicto you, but I am more than twice your age, and I have lived tosee the population of our globe double. By the time youre myage, it will have quadrupled, and not exactly in the fashion youexpect. For instance, by the year 2000 there is going to be suchcultural and ethnic rearrengement as to challenge your notion of


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your own humanity.

That alone will reduce the prospects of originality andinventiveness as antidotes to boredom. But even in a moremonochromatic world, the other trouble with originality andinventiveness is precisely that they literally pay o. Providedthat you are capable of either, you will become well o ratherfast. Desirable as that may be, most of you know firsthand thatnobody is as bored as the rich, for money buys time, and time isrepetitive. Assuming that you are not heading for poverty forotherwise you wouldnt have entered college one expects youto be hit by boredom as soon as the first tools ofself-gratification become available to you.

Thanks to modern technology, those tools are as numerous asboredoms synonyms. In light of their function to render youoblivious to the redundancy of time their abundance isrevealing. Equally revealing is the function your purchasingpower, toward whose increase youll walk out of thiscommencement ground through the click and whirr of some ofthose instruments tightly held by your parents and relatives. It isa prophetic scene, ladies and gentlemen of the class of 1989, foryou are entering the world where recording and event dwarfs theevent itself the world of video, stereo, remote control, joggingsuit, and exercise machine to keep you fit for reliving your ownor someone elses past: canned ecstasy claming raw flesh.

Everything that displays a pattern is pregnant with boredom.That apllies to money in more ways than one, both to thebanknotes as such and to possessing them. That is not to billpoverty, of course, as an escape from boredom although St.Francis, it would seem, has managed exactly that. Yet for all thedeprivation surrounding us, the idea of new monastic ordersdoesnt appear particularly catchy in this era of video-Christianity. Besides, young and newfangled, you are more eager


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to do good in some South Africa or other than next door, keeneron giving up your favorite brand of soda than on venturing tothe wrong side of the tracks. So nobody advises poverty for you.All one can suggest is to be a bit more apprehensive of money,for the zeros in your accounts may usher in their mentalequivalents.

As for poverty, boredom is the most brutal part of its misery, andthe departure from it takes more radical forms: of violentrebellion or drug addiction. Both are temporary, for the miseryof poverty is infinite; both, because of that infinity, are costly. Ingeneral, a man shooting heroin into his vein does so largely forthe same reason you buy a video: to dodge the redundancy oftime. The dierence, though, is that he spends more than hesgot, and that his means of escape become as redundant as whathe is escaping from faster than yours. On the whole, thedierence in tactility between a syringes needle and a stereospush buttom roughly corresponds to that between the acutenessand dullness of times impact upon the have-nots and the haves.In short, whether rich or poor, sooner or later you will beaicted by this redundancy of time.Potential haves, youll bebored with your work, your friends, your spouses, your lovers,the view from your window, the furniture or wallpaper in yourroom, your thoughts, yourselves. Accordingly, youll try to deviseways of escape. Apart from the self-gratifying gadgetsmentioned before, you may take up changing jobs, residence,company, country, climate; you may take up prosmicuity,alcohol, travel, cooking lessons, drugs, psychoanalysis.

In fact, you may lump all these together; and for a while thatmay work. Until the day, of course, when you wake up in yourbedroom amid a new family and a dierent wallpaper, in adierent state and climate, with a heap of bills from your travelagent and your shrink, yet with the same stale feeling toward


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the light of day pouring through your window. Youll put on yourloafers only to discover theyre lacking bootstraps to liftyourself out of what you recognize. Depending on yourtemperament or the age you are at, you will either panic orresign yourself to the familiarity of the sensation; or else youllgo through the rigmarole of change once more.

Neurosis and depression will enter your lexicon ; pills, yourmedical cabinet . Basically, there is nothing wrong about turninglife into the constant quest for alternatives, into leap-frogging jobs, spouses, sorroundings, etc., provided you can aord thealimony and jumbled memories. This predicament, after all, hasbeen suciently glamorized on screen and in Romantic poetry.The rub, however, is that before long this quest turns into afull-time occupation, with your need for an alternative comingto match a drug addicts daily fix.

There is yet another way out of it, however. Not a better one,perhaps, from your point of view, and not necessarily secure, butstraight and inexpensive. Those of you who have read RobertFrosts Servant to Servants may remember a line of hos: Thebest way out is always through. So what I am about to suggest isa variation on the theme.

When hit by boredom, go for it. Let yourself be crushed by it;submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, therule is, the sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. Theidea here, to paraphrase another great poet of the Englishlanguage, is to exact full look at the worst. The reason boredomdeserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted timein all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.

In a manner of speaking, boredom is your window on time, onthose properties of it one tends to ignore to the likely peril ofones mental equilibrium. In short, it is your window on times


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infinity, which is to say, on your insignificance in it. Thats whataccounts, perhaps, for ones dread of lonely, torpid evenings, forthe fascination with which one watches sometimes a fleck ofdust aswirl in a sunbeam, and somewhere a clock tick-tocks, theday is hot, and your willpower is at zero.

Once this window opens, dont try to shut it; on the contrary,throw it wide open. For boredom speakes the language of time,and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson in your life theone you didnt get here, on these green lawns the lesson of yourutter insignificance. It is valuable to you, as well as to those youare to rub shoulders with. You are finite, time tells you in avoice of boredom, and whatever you do is, from my point ofview, futile. As music to your ears, this, of course, may notcount; yet the sense of futility, of limited significance even ofyour best, most ardent actions is better than the illusion of theirconsequences and the attendant self-aggrandizement .

For boredom is an invasion of time into your set of values. Itputs your existance into its perspective, the net result of whichis precision and humility. The former, it must be noted, breedsthe latter. The more you learn about your own size, the morehumble and the more compassionate you become to your likes ,to that dust aswirl in a sunbean or already immobile atop yourtable. Ah, how much life went into those fleck! Not from yourpoint of view but from theirs. You are to them what time is toyou; thats why they look so small. And do you know what thedust says when its being wiped o the table?

Remember me, whispers the dust.

Nothing could be farther away from the mental agenda of any ofyou, young and newfangled, than the sentiment expressed in thistwo-liner of the German poet Peter Huchel, now dead.


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Ive quoted it not because Id like to instill in you anity forthings small seeds and plants, grains of sand or mosquitoes small but numerous. Ive quoted these lines because I like them,because I recognize in them myself, and, for that matter, anyliving organism to be wiped o from the available surface.Remember me, whispers the dust. And one hears in this thatif we learn about ourselves from time, perhaps time, in turn, maylearn something from us. What would that be? That inferior insignificance, we best it in sensitivity.

This is what it means to be insignificant. If it takeswill-paralyzing boredom to bring this home, then hail theboredom. You are insignificant because you are finite. Yet themore finite a thing is, the more it is charged with life, emotions,joy, fears, compassion. For infinity is not terribly lively, notterribly emotional. Your boredom, at least, tells you that much.Because your boredom is the boredom of infinity.

Respect it, then, for its origins as much perhaps as for yourown. Because it is the anticipation of that inanimate infinitythat accounts for the intensity of human sentiments, oftenresulting in a conception of a new life. This is not to say that youhave been conceived out of boredom, or that the finite breedsthe finite (though both may ring true ). It is to suggest, rather,that passion is the privilege of the insignificant.

So try to stay passionate, leave your cool to constellations.Passion, above all, is a remedy against boredom. Another one, ofcourse, is pain physical more than psychological, passionsfrequent aftermath ; although I wish you neither. Still, when youhurt you know that at least you havent been deceived (by yourbody or by your psyche). By the same token , whats good aboutboredom, about anguish and the sense of the meaninglessness ofyour own, of everything elses existence, is that it is not adeception.


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You also might try detective novels or action movies something that leaves you where you havent beenverbally/visually/mentally before something sustained, if onlyfor a couple of hours. Avoid TV, especially flipping the channels:thats redundancy incarnate. Yet should those remedies fail, let iton, fling your soul upon the growing gloom . Try to embrace,or let yourself be embraced by, boredom and anguish, whichanyhow are larger than you. No doubt youll find that bosom smothering , yet try to endure it as long as you can, and thensome more. Above all, dont think youve goofed somewherealong the line, dont try to retrace your steps to correct the error.No, as the poet said, Believe your pain. This awful bearhug isno mistake. Nothing that disturbs you is. Remember all alongthat there is no embrace in this world that wont finally unclasp.

If you find all this gloomy , you dont know what gloom is. If youfind this irrelevant, I hope time will prove you right. Should youfind this inappropriate for such a lofty occasion, I will disagree.

I would agree with you had this occasion been celebrating yourstaying here; but it marks your departure. By tomorrow youll beout of here, since your parents paid only for four yearsm not aday longer. So you must go elsewhere, to make your careers,money, families, to meet your unique fates. And as for thatelsewhere, neither among stars and in the tropics nor across theborder in Vermont is there much awareness of this ceremony onthe Dartmouth Green. One wouldnt even bet that the sound ofyour band reaches White River Junction .

You are exiting this place, members of the class of 1989. You areentering the world, which is going to be far more thickly settledthan this neck of the woods and where youll be paid far lessattention than you have been used to for the last four years. Youare on your own in a big way. Speaking of your significance, youcan quickly estimate it by pitting your 1,100 against the worlds


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4.9 billion. Prudence, then, is as appropriate on this occasion asis fanfare.

I wish you nothing but happiness. Still, there is going to beplenty of dark and, whats worse, dull hours, caused as much bythe world ourside as by your own minds. You ought to befortified against that is some fashion; and thats what Ive triedto do here in my feeble way, although thats obviously notenough.

For what lies ahead is a remarkable but wearisome journey; youare boarding today, as it were, a runaway train. No one can tellyou what lies ahead, least of all those who remain behind. Onething, however, they can assure you of is that its not a roundtrip. Try, therefore, to derive some comfort from the notion thatno matter how unpalatable this or that station may turn out otbe, the train doesnt stop there for good. Therefore, you arenever stuck not even when you feel you are; for this placetoday becomes your past. From now on, it will only be receding for you, for that train is in constant motion. It will be recedingfor you even when you feel that you are stuck So take one lastlook at it, while it is still its normal size, while it is not yet aphotograph. Look at it with all the tenderness you can muster ,for you are looking at your past. Exact, as it were , the full lookat the best. For I doubt youll have it better than here.

Copyright 1995 by Joseph Brodsky All rightsreserved. Published in 1995 by Farrar, Strauss andGiroux. First paperback edition, 1997.

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2 Respostas to IN PRAISE OF BOREDOMdiscounted christian louboutin Says:

23/05/2011 at 12:51 AM

Interesting, still I\ve came accross one completely oppositeblog post the other day

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1.

Carol Says:

23/05/2011 at 9:25 AM

In what sense? What do you mean by opposite?

This was a speech the poet Joseph Brodsky gave on anamerican university. I dont remember which one though

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